REV BASIL VAN RENSBURG: The South African Catholic priest Father Basil van Rensburg, who died on March 28th aged 71, gained international recognition for his fight against the apartheid regime's forced removal of the people of District Six, a historic area on the edge of Cape Town's central business district at the foot of Table Mountain.
Originally housing a multi- racial population, including English and Irish immigrant families, and a Jewish quarter, by the 1960s District Six had become home to 55,000 coloured people, many of them Muslims. Its crowded alleyways and picturesque streets, with a fishmarket and a vibrant community life, have been celebrated in novels, poetry and a theatrical production, District Six - The Musical.
In 1966, the Nationalist apartheid government declared that District Six was to be an area for white occupation only, announcing its intention to embark on a slum clearance programme and to redevelop the area. The inhabitants were to be moved miles out of Cape Town, to the dusty and windswept Cape Flats.
Ten years after the start of this programme, Basil van Rensburg was posted to the Holy Cross parish in District Six. He immediately began mobilising public opinion against the mass removals. A Friends of District Six organisation was set up, attracting international media interest, much to the government's embarrassment and annoyance.
So sustained and effective was the resistance campaign that Pretoria was obliged to carry out the removals in piecemeal fashion, moving from street to street and bulldozing a few houses at a time. Only the district's many churches and mosques were left standing.
In this way, the agony of District Six was prolonged until 1980, when the last house was demolished. The removals caused great hurt and bitterness to the families who lost their homes, and anger and revulsion in the white community of the relatively liberal Cape region.
Partly as a result of Basil van Rensburg's mobilisation of public opinion, very few whites could be persuaded to move to the district, which remains mostly undeveloped today - a desolate wasteland and reminder of the regime's devastation of a once bustling community. A scheme is now in hand to encourage former inhabitants and their descendants to return.
Basil van Rensburg was born on November 8th, 1930, in Cape Town, the son of an Afrikaner family, and worked as a bus conductor while completing his high school education at St Agnes's Woodstock and at the Salesian Institute, studying at night. He began a career in an advertising agency, specialising in writing and producing commercial jingles for radio.
He was ordained at the relatively late age of 45, his vocation partly resulting from a meeting with a remarkable Anglican priest, Father Bernard Wrankmore, in 1971, at a time when the South African security police were detaining anti-apartheid activists without trial, holding them incommunicado in solitary confinement and, often enough, subjecting them to physical assault and torture during interrogation.
After a Muslim cleric, Imam Haron, died in detention, and his body was found to be covered with 48 large bruises, Father Wrankmore, who had never previously been involved in politics, began a fast at a Muslim shrine on the slopes of Lion's Head, alongside Table Mountain, declaring that he would continue until the Pretoria government held a public inquest into the causes of Haron's death. South Africa's security police had claimed that Haron had injured himself falling down stairs.
Intrigued by Wrankmore's stand, Basil van Rensburg went to the shrine, persuaded Wrankmore to take orange juice with water, and helped care for him when he gave up his fast after 40 days. After a hurriedly held - and private - inquest into Haron's death exonerated the security police, a finding which was not accepted by public opinion at the Cape, Basil van Rensburg left advertising to begin studying for the priesthood.
Once most of his District Six parishioners had been banished, Basil van Rensburg was transferred to St Gabriel's, Gugulethu, an African township outside Cape Town - one of the poorest parishes in the Cape Town archdiocese.
Basil van Rensburg: born 1930; died March 2002